WD Red as storage?

[nervx]

I can get a 2TB western digital red for $2 less then the same size green drive. Since the red drives are designed with nas in mind I need to know, are there are any downsides to buying the red over the green in my situation? The drive will be used to store music, movies and other stuff in my desktop. It will be accessed on a regular basis.
Also can red drives stop the platters and go into idle after 20 minutes of not being used or will they always be spinning because of the nas support?

 

[Soulkeeper]

i'd definitely choose red over green if the price is close.
The red drives are newer/faster and support TLER

Stopping/starting the platters from spinning is generally not a good idea if you want the drives to last/survive a long time(it can be done). They should automatically do the proper stuff without user intervention. At 5400rpm both the green and red drives should be quiet and use hardly any power.

 

[blastingcap]

Red or green? If you are using hardware RAID, definitely go Red for compatibility and TLER reasons. Just forget about the Greens.

If you are using software RAID then Greens, at a big enough discount, can be fine. But if the price premium for Reds are low enough, like $2 in your case (actually NEGATIVE $2!), I'd go Red since it has 3 years warranty instead of 1-2 years like the cheapo Seagates and WD drives. You can change when they go they start/stop but I'd give it 60 minutes minimum, maybe 120 minutes or more, as Soulkeeper noted.

Tougher q: if the price were equal which would I go for, the WD 3TB Reds or the Hitachi 5k3000 3TBs which run slightly warmer and draw slightly more power but have Backblaze's high recommendation? Honestly I don't know. So I got a pair of 5k3000 Hitachi 3TBs AND a pair of WD30EFRX Red 3TBs. Both are being used with Nas4Free as mirrored ZFS drives. The WD's are a little faster in sequential and the Hitachis are a little faster in random access/IO. Nothing unusual to report. I set them to always-on and can't comment on TLER etc. since I'm not on hardware RAID.

 

[Tsavo]

Red is fine as regular storage, that's what I use mine for. It's also quite a bit faster than my other 5400 rpm drives...but those are somewhat older devices.

 

[taltamir]

Red are actually more power efficient than green.
Red also are made from higher quality components and should thus be more reliable.
There is absolutely no reason to use green over red other than greens being cheaper. If you found a red cheaper then go for it.

PS.
TLER is not a feature, its the removal of a feature (A feature called "Deep Error recovery" is removed with TLER). In order to support sub par RAID schemes (good ones are not bothered by deep error recovery). WD is the only company that ever charged extra for allowing you remove that feature... so that probably explains why it is now the king of HDDs. (not ripping off consumers doesn't pay as well)

 

[alphascout]

Forget about the greens period Red's are way more usefull if you want to raid as well.

 

[nervx]

alright thanks everyone. picking up the red drive tomorrow

 

[Turbonium]

Red are actually more power efficient than green.

Where are you getting this from? I had no idea.

TLER is not a feature, its the removal of a feature (A feature called "Deep Error recovery" is removed with TLER). In order to support sub par RAID schemes (good ones are not bothered by deep error recovery). WD is the only company that ever charged extra for allowing you remove that feature... so that probably explains why it is now the king of HDDs. (not ripping off consumers doesn't pay as well)

Isn't that bad then? Sounds like Deep Error Recovery is a feature you'd want on a standalone storage drive.

 

[taltamir]

Where are you getting this from? I had no idea.

http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_red_nas_hard_drive_review_wd30efrx

Isn't that bad then? Sounds like Deep Error Recovery is a feature you'd want on a standalone storage drive.

It is something you should want in a standalone drive, yes.
I should clarify.

Some time ago if a drive failed to read a sector it would retry 1 or 2 times and then remap it and mark it as a bad sector and the data was gone.

Drive makers came up with schemes that tried to recover data. WD marketing called their implementation of that "Deep Error Recovery" (as you can see as an advertised feature on drives), which takes up to 2 minutes to reread the sector again and again and supposedly attempt some secret (TM) algorithms to try and recover the data before giving up on it. If it can recover it, it will write said data to the sector it remaps to.

It was then noticed that many RAID controllers would notice the drive not responding for 2 minutes and conclude the drive failed, kicking it off the array.

Manufacturers then gave users power to control this by running a software that will send modifications to the drive settings, the drive then saves the user preference on whether to have it on, off, or on but with a different time limit then 2 minutes. Furthermore, drives built for servers had their default set to no or very little time spent on recovery. This is because servers typically cannot afford to just stop sending data for a whole 2 minutes and should have redundancy anyways.

WD however used it to artificially differentiate "server" and "consumer" drives by not allowing general consumer drives to disable deep error recovery like every other manufacturer. And thus the marketing gimmick called TLER was born, it stands for "Time Limited Error Recovery".

IIRC the first versions of TLER didn't let you modify anything, they just came with a "RAID friendly default" of no DER, while current versions let you have full control over it and set it to on, off, or on with a different time limit then 2 minutes.

The interesting thing is, that not all RAID schemes are crippled by deep error recovery. And if you don't have RAID at all, well then there is no reason to not let the drive fully attempt to recover corrupt sectors.

 

[nervx]

^
Is the lack of deep error recovery something I should be conserned with in choosing a red drive for standalone storage? Sounds kind of important.

 

[blastingcap]

I don't know how much more clearly talt could have explained that.

Using hardware RAID? Avoid the low-end consumer WD (Blue/Green) drives and go Red or RE. Or buy Seagate or Toshiba HDDs. I'm not sure if WD Black drives let you modify error recovery times, but talt probably does.

Not using hardware RAID? Use whatever you want.

To answer your q directly: for standalone drives, you can use Green drives or whatever as you please. If you have a programmable drive like apparently the WD Reds, you may want to reprogram a WD Red/etc. to try longer than 7 seconds.

 

[taltamir]

Is the lack of deep error recovery something I should be conserned with in choosing a red drive for standalone storage? Sounds kind of important.

While it decreases the chance of recovering data from a failed sector, failed sectors are fairly rare, and successfully recovering data from a failed sector is also fairly rare (although with TLER it is impossible).
It is ultimately your decision, but for a drive that is not going into RAID I don't think it makes enough of a difference to affect the purchasing decision.
You should backup your data rather than rely on an a CHANCE at recovery.

Using hardware RAID? Avoid the low-end consumer WD (Blue/Green) drives and go Red or RE. Or buy Seagate or Toshiba HDDs.

Not using hardware RAID? Use whatever you want.

This sums it up, especially the bolt part...
I did just came across a specific "Green" model that did have TLER.
So basically, read the drive's feature list if you need it for your RAID setup.

And I should clarify that although other manufacturers allow the change, the tools are really hard to find and operate.
People generally just buy a drive with it enabled by default if they really need it for their hardware RAID.

I recall hearing of some people getting a drive specific tool directly from customer service of seagate/hitachi.
You can find more info about the generic tools here http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1562128&page=3

I'm not sure if WD Black drives let you modify error recovery times

I am actually not sure about the WD blacks.

But this is now moot; I was going to link to WD tool for toggling but searching for it I found out that WD has dropped support for the ability to toggle TLER in all drives and warns that using their old tool for it will make newer drives inoperable.
So, if you need TLER, get a drive that offers it.

 

[nervx]

In the anandtech review they use a program to change drive settings including adjusting tler. They don't mention if the setting is volatile or if it survives power cycling. Anyone know?

Using something like check-disk you can still attempt to recover bad sectors longer than tler allows correct?

Last do you get any warning if a bad sector shows up?

 

[imagoon]

If you are really concerned, backup. You can also use a resilient FS like ZFS or ReFS to store data also. Drives like the REDs and other short recover time drives are actually better suited for those filesystems. You should get alerts about bad sectors in /var/log or the Windows Event log on a failed read. It also will appear in the SMART data on the disk.

 

[ViRGE]

In the anandtech review they use a program to change drive settings including adjusting tler. They don't mention if the setting is volatile or if it survives power cycling. Anyone know?

Using something like check-disk you can still attempt to recover bad sectors longer than tler allows correct?

Last do you get any warning if a bad sector shows up?

WD's TLER utility is non-volitile. Whatever you set a drive to it will stick to. This is what I used to disable TLER on my Red (it was an RMA replacement for a Green).

 

[nervx]

WD's TLER utility is non-volitile. Whatever you set a drive to it will stick to. This is what I used to disable TLER on my Red (it was an RMA replacement for a Green).

So it survives power cycles, good. If I remember correctly when using the tool you have unplug all but the drive you're changing settings on correct? Would that include ssd or just western digital drives?

 

[ViRGE]

So it survives power cycles, good. If I remember correctly when using the tool you have unplug all but the drive you're changing settings on correct? Would that include ssd or just western digital drives?

Just Western Digital drives. It has no effect on non-WD drives.

 

[Emulex]

just use sas drives. nobody wants 1TB constellation's. sas is far superior in the fact that it has both IOEDC(detect) and IOECC and is fully ecc protected.

If you don't use ZFS and haven't experienced corruption in raid with sata, you haven't been around enough.

READS are not checked so a bitflip or bad ram could get by and present to your server .

SAS keeps its real here. Nobody wants 1TB drives